BMTV

Televisual irony of the week number 2

September 19, 2006

It says a lot about the state of our society when there’s an ad for McCain oven chips during Jamie’s Return to School Dinners last night (Channel Four, 9pm)…

Aaanyway…

Jamie (who looks like he’s had a few too many turkey twizzlers himself) roamed around the UK, trying his damnedest to secure healthy, warm meals for our little kiddiwinks, and getting very frustrated at the government in the process. He even (gosh!) got political at one moment, asking the education secretary (when he was told the government can’t plan budgets beyond 2008) if they’d have enough money to keep “our boys” in Iraq… Keep focussed, now Jamie…

In the climax of last night’s show, Jamie met the PM (Tony, to Jamie) in his garden at Number ten, where Tone proceeded to tell Jamie that “they would find” £1 million in funding if Jamie needed it… Now, that’s all very well and good, but they also promised funding before, and it never materialised (or it did, just in the form of 5p per child…).

On another matter, it’s really starting to piss me off, all these people whinging about the banning of junk food in schools being a breach of our freedom of choice. Hate to sound like an old fogey, but when I was a child, I wasn’t allowed to choose what food I ate. The idea is preposterous. You wouldn’t let children as young as six choose what time they went to bed, or whether to smoke cigarettes. So why let them choose what food to eat? They don’t have nearly enough knowledge on the matter. If this right to choose is about the parent’s right to choose, then again, surely there is no choice when it comes to chocolate versus salads… “No thanks, Jamie, you can take your salads and warm, healthy meals: I’d rather my child ate a diet of crisps and sweets and grew up obese and depressed.”

Given the choice between junk and spaghetti bolognaise, one boy interviewed extolled the virtues of the latter, saying that he’d not have the junk back ever. So there you go.

PS: Don’t think we didn’t notice the awful product placement of Dinnerlady-Nora’s new book when she took it out of her bag, waved it around a bit and then gave it to Jamie as a berd-dee present… Shame on you, production team…